15k miles, £26 a day... this Latin America race is truly A-ma-zon!

Race Across The World ★★★★☆ Hilary Mantel: Return To Wolf Hall ★★★★★

The backpacking adventure show Race Across The Wor l d (BBC2, Sunday) returned for a second series and I can only imagine the first ran horribly over budget.

Why? Because the original batch of contestants started in London and ended up in Singapore. This time around they started in Mexico City and the final destination was . . . Argentina. Not so much a ‘race across the world’ as a ‘race through Latin America’.

Not that travelling 15,000 miles is a walk in the park when you don’t have access to a phone, have just £26 a day to live on and are not allowed to travel by plane.

The competing couples were a mixed bunch, all there to improve their own relationships (and win the £20k prize, of course).

There was uncle and nephew emon and Jamiul who had once been close but grown estranged.

Michael and Shuntelle met on Tinder. he is ex-military and was in his element roughing it in the great outdoors. high-flyer Shuntelle only travelled business class and hasn’t been on a bus in a decade.

Rob and Jen were a young married couple who weren’t the most natural travellers. Jen said: ‘ We’re awful, I always think everyone is trying to rob me.’

Finally, there was mother and son Jo and Sam. ‘She’s getting to the age where she’s too told to travel,’ said young Sam of his incredibly fit and sprightly 54-year- old mum. They won the first leg, arriving at the checkpoint in honduras way ahead of their rivals, thanks to their tenacity, willingness to rough it and the kindness of locals.

When the schedules are packed with celebrity travel shows, it was wonderful to see ordinary people getting a chance to shine and experience the journey of a lifetime.

In Hilary Mantel: Return To Wolf Hall (BBC2 Saturday) we saw somebody trying to live an ordinary life despite her extraordinary success and background.

The documentary was made to promote the release of The Mirror & The Light, the final tome in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Apparently, the idea to write about Cromwell came to Mantel almost like a vision.

It was while she was pushing her trolley around Sainsbury’s that she settled upon how she was going to write Cromwell’s execution scene.

Despite him being a manipulative tyrant, Mantel made her version of Cromwell a gentle and caring father.

her publisher, Nicholas Pearson, believed there was a very personal reason for this. Mantel’s mother, Margaret, took her away from her father when she was 11. The family relocated and Margaret’s lover was passed off as both the husband of the house and the father — a story Mantel wrote about in her memoirs, Giving Up The Ghost.

Saturday’s programme showed a vulnerable side to a very private woman bringing to an end what has been the most exhausting and rewarding chapter in her life. With Wolf hall and its follow up, Bring Up The Bodies, both winning the Booker Prize, it would almost be a travesty if The Mirror & The Light didn’t make Mantel the first author to win three times.

Modest, intelligent and engaging, this documentary was also poignant. A 15-year labour of love, saying goodbye to the character she had brought back to life was understandably emotional for Mantel.

In the end she brilliantly described it as ‘like polishing up a thunderstorm — you have to accept it’s bigger than you are.’

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS is away.